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gde_51443_m ember_82222832 Ten Technical points that every system admin should know when joining into a new team
You might have already read my old post, 7 tips that new system admins should know in new team ,where I have discussed the social engineering points that helps you to quickly sync with the new team. And this post is the continuation post for the same topic, and I will be discussing the technical aspects that every system admin should know during his initial phase in his new job. And these rules are same for everyone, irrespective of experience that he/she has in the old organization. Before going to actual topic I would like to highlight one important point: whenever we work for any organization for long time we feel that we are comfortable with the job, and most of the times we will assume that it is our technical skill that is making us comfortable in our existing job but the actual fact is it is not our technical skill alone that makes us comfortable, it is our historical knowledge about the current environment added to our technical skill which makes us more comfortable with the current job. In simple terms, if you assume your technical skill as 1 then every piece of information that you know about the history of the environment will add a 0 (zero) next to the 1 and having more 0s next 1 will improve your value in the job. Whenever you join to a new job, you will be carrying only the 1 with you from old job to new job and the rest of the 0s you have to re-gain from the new job. So, during initial stage of new job keep your focus to understand the historical
information about current environment, from the existing team, whenever you get a chance to discuss about it.
d. What are the applications currently running on our server environment, and who is using them? e.g. sybase, clearcase, weblogic .. etc.
e. What Storage is in use right now, and What sort of Console systems we are using to connect to the Servers remotely? EMC, Netapp, Cyclades Consoles ..etc. f. What storage management software is in use in which operating systems? e.g. LVM, VxVM , ZFS etc.
vary from job to job, during the initial stage of your job you should understand these rules and perform your duties accordingly. Note : ITIL ( Information Technology Infrastructure Library) talks about the guidelines to define the above rules in a standard way in any IT related organization. Now a days, major companies streamlining their procedures to meet with these ITIL guidelines so that it will be easy to manage the environment although the people who created that environment leaves the organization. Learning ITIL is always beneficial to system admins( or any Infrastructure Support person).
Other
Being a System Admin, major part of our day job involves communication with other support teams like. Database Team, Network Team, Application Team, Hardware Vendors, Data Center Support Team etc.
For successful service delivery, it is important to system administrators to have all of their contact details ( .. like Phone, email and Internal Chat IDs ) handy. So gather the information and make a good document which you can use in your job. It is very important to write down this information and keep it safe, because most of the times the minor issues turns into major problems if we dont know whom to contact right immediate we noticed the issue.
As i explained in the point 1, you may or may not manage these infrastructure servers depending on the scope of your team, but you must know the details of these servers because every other server in your environment depends on these infrastructure servers. Below are the important question you can try to find answers, during the initial stage of job: a. What Name servers( DNS / NIS / LDAP ) we are using, and what are the names / aliases / IPs of those servers ? b. What remote installation ( jumpstart/ kickstart) servers we are using and our access to them ? c. Whether there is any DHCP server available in the environment or is it managed by customized tools? E.g. QIP etc.